It is at London’s Euston station that I arranged to meet the journalist Elin Lindqvist. I am here to do an interview with her about her new book, “Fukushima Colours”, which is a collection of eight stories of people affected by the devastating earthquake and ensuing nuclear leak in Japan last year.
We head to a café just outside the station. It is one of those horrid days when the London weather appears to have malfunctioned. The day started off bright and sunny, then it began to rain, then it rolled back to being sunny — and so on. Lindqvist has a train to catch, for Manchester, after our meeting, which is near to where home is. After getting our drinks I sit down to listen as she tells me about March 11 last year, when an magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck Japan.
“I was at home” she says. “I first heard it when my father called me early in the morning and said ‘turn on the television. Something horrible is happening in Japan.’ I turned on the news and then I cried for two days.”
There were images of a huge tsunami washing over the coastline. These were followed by reports of an alarming nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant.
For Lindqvist, 29, it was particularly painful as she was born in Japan. Her family, originally from Sweden, left the country when she was only about 2 and she grew up mostly in France. At 17, after graduating from high school, she had gone back to Japan to rediscover the place of her birth and stayed there for about a year to study Japanese. Later she went back for another year and had been travelling back and forth since.
After getting news of the earthquake she desperately tried to call people in Japan, but the lines were jammed. It took a while but finally she was able to make contact. To her relief, her friends were fine but the Fukushima nuclear crisis was only getting started. “I got myself together and thought I absolutely have to go,” she says.
Lindqvist was concerned the media was too focused on the dramatic side of explosions at the nuclear plant, which was indeed worrying, but as a writer she wanted to convey how people were dealing with the situation. So Lindqvist called up Sweden’s largest newspaper, Aftonbladet, and said she wanted to go. “They said, ‘No you are not going anywhere. We are just calling back our people’.”
Yet her timing was good as Japan was a big story. So she signed a disclosure declaring she was travelling there as a freelance journalist on her own behalf. A Swedish photographer was to accompany her. However, he cancelled just a few hours before the flight because his young son had been crying all night asking him not to leave.
But that didn’t stop Lindqvist, and barely a week after the fifth most powerful earthquake ever recorded, she landed in Japan. There, a close Japanese friend who later collaborated with her on “Fukushima Colours”, Yuko Ota, introduced her to a photographer called Yoshikazu Fukuda. “His English is as good as my Japanese,” she says. “We didn’t have a common language but we felt we could collaborate. There was a kind of connection you sometimes feel with people.”
They travelled to the devastated areas in a minivan with a volunteer organisation, carrying food and water. Her first impressions were hard to convey in words. “I think silence is what overwhelms you at first,” she says. “I think it is important to take in those moments. We had seen the pictures but to see it live, to feel the stench as well — there were still bodies trapped in buildings, there were a lot of dead fish from the fish market but also obviously from what the wave had left behind. Enormous amounts of trash and debris and entire communities, cities, ports completely taken away. Dropped further into the valley or just taken out into the ocean. I mean the concrete structures were completely ripped apart.”
She noticed strange imagery all around. “I remember this one woman who was collecting cloth-hangers from trees that the wave had left hanging” she says. “The sort of absurd images like that where everything has been turned upside down. The houses floating in the ocean; boats on land, on top of buildings.”
She dispatched reports about the devastation for <Aftonbladet>, and after staying for a while she returned to England. But mentally, Lindqvist felt, she remained in Japan, so she decided to go back there in May. This time she wrote not just for Aftonbladet but also for a more serious newspaper in Sweden called <Svenska Dagbladet>. Besides travelling to the devastated areas in the north, which she had visited earlier, she made a trip to the Fukushima prefecture. On her previous trip she hadn’t gone there because of the risk of exposure to radiation from the nuclear plant.
She stayed in Fukushima for a few days. “I definitely was exposed to more radiation than I would be here when I am at home,” she says. “But I knew that it was only going to be for that short period of time.” She worries more about the people who live there who are being exposed to this on a daily basis, including the potential impact on children from Fukushima when they grow older.
She also went to the 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. “It is absurd, this border,” she says. “It is like this line that goes straight through rice fields; there is no physical line but it is just this idea that on this side we are safe, we can walk around with no safety equipment and get on with our lives, and just a metre away on the other side it is radioactive, dangerous, ‘do not touch’. That is a very difficult balance for people to live with.”
Unlike the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, most of the fallout from Fukushima Daiichi ended up in the sea. Some people might consider this to be safer. Yet there are a lot of unknowns. “You can’t make a 20-kilometre zone in the middle of the ocean obviously because of the currents and the fish,” Lindqvist says. “So there are two main theories when it comes to what happens to radioactive materials in the sea. One is that it dissipates because of the sheer vastness of the ocean. This radioactive fallout eventually disappears. The second theory is that it could bioaccumulate into the food chain – or even biomagnify. “So you have the algae that take in all the radioactive material, the little fish that eats the algae, and inside that little fish, the radioactive material becomes even more dense” she says. “The bigger fish swims by and eats that fish and then finally we come and fish that big fish further down along the coast. How dangerous is it? So, basically, it is very hard to know.”
She points out that in March last year the Japanese prime minister considered a plan to evacuate 30 million people living in the Tokyo area. “It is so huge it’s hard to even understand,” she says. “Now it never happened. But to know that it is even a remote possibility is very scary.”
Lindqvist talks about a feeling in Japan that the local media is too attached to the government and that they don’t question enough. “My own opinion is that a lot more needs to be written and talked about this all over the world because this has repercussions for us as well,” she says. “Not only because of the ocean and what potentially could come out into the air and all these things, but also because nuclear power plants are being used all over the world.”
She gives the example of Vietnam where nuclear power plants are being built using Japanese technology. “However I also happen to know that the nuclear power industry is a very powerful lobby all over the world,” she says. “The last thing that they want is for this to become a worldwide, much more engaged debate.”
But she also warns against exaggerating the risks involved due to myths and legends. “I have had some foreign friends who were like, ‘maybe you will come back all green or phosphorous’,” she laughs.
During her trips to Japan she came across people with moving stories who she managed to stay in touch with in different ways all through 2011. One of those featured in her book is of Minoru Endo, who worked as a MD at a Honda repair workshop in the town of Tomioka, located in the 20-kilometre exclusion zone of Fukushima power plant. All the residents had to abandon the town. Since then Endo has made a number of trips back to Tomioka to bring items he left behind. “The first time he went back was before the government even declared the exclusion zone,” Lindqvist says. “So he went in with his wife and his car, with just plastic covers on them, because they wanted to retrieve their ancestor’s ashes from the altar. You do that in Japan, you keep your ancestors’ ashes in urns in the altar — a way of paying respect and tribute to them.”
Customers had left their cars at his workshop before the earthquake. Endo felt a responsibility to move them from there before the accumulated radioactive fallout made those cars dangerous. He even filmed his visit to Tomioka using a little handheld camera. Endo showed Lindqvist images of cows standing by the side of the road waiting for farmers that were never going to come, pets that had been left behind. Later, the zone was announced and residents could apply for two-hour visits to retrieve personal items and so on.
Lindqvist noticed an evolution in Endo’s response to the earthquake as the year went by. At first she remembers him slamming his fists on the table and saying they had enough, that the Japanese government needed to tell them how dangerous the radioactive fallout was. He wanted to know if they could ever return home. If not, he wanted to be informed so they could rearrange their lives and find work and residence elsewhere. There are some 80, 000 people from the exclusion zone living in a kind of limbo.
“That has changed a little bit. When I went back in April, Minoru Endo was no longer thinking that he ever was going to return,” Lindqvist says. “The last time that he went inside [the exclusion zone] was in February. When they opened the door to their house it was completely infested with mice and rats. If they do go back, those houses will have to be taken down and rebuilt. And it is just not going to happen. Although the government has not said that officially yet, that seems to be the feeling that they just won’t return. In which case Minoru Endo and many of his compatriots want to rebuild communities somewhere else.”
Previously, Lindqvist has written three novels, two of which are fictional stories with some links to Japan. In fact, she comes from a family rich in writers. Her father Herman Lindqvist is a popular historian who wrote the history of Sweden in ten volumes. And her great grandfather, Leon Larsson, was a prominent anarchosocialist poet whose life she has researched and written in a “documentary novel” published in 2009. Speaking of the name “Larsson”, she replies in the negative when I ask her if she has any family connections with the world-renowned Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson. Yet I could picture her as a character in one of Larsson’s novels, perhaps with the title “The Girl Who Went to Fukushima”.
Coincidently enough, Larsson sheds light on the world of Swedish journalism in his acclaimed <Millennium> trilogy, although the main female protagonist is a hacker, not a journalist. “I am not a huge fan to be honest,” Lindqvist says. “But I feel really sorry for Stieg Larsson because he died before his novels became popular — that I think is the huge tragedy. What is nice about those novels is the feminist aspect. People in so many parts of the world want to read about a strong female character. I think there is a great need for that.”
Lindqvist’s inspiration appears to be her father, who was also a war correspondent. As a child she remembers him telling her bedtime stories. She liked to hear him talk about the wars and horrible catastrophes he went to as a twentysomething in Africa or South America. She believes it got her to be curious about the world.
I ask Lindqvist where the title of the book comes from. “When I first reached the devastation area, which was not Fukushima but further north, the first thing that really struck me was this immense greyness,” she explains. “These personal belongings of people has become this big, single mass of trash. Then you start walking through it, and you start picking out colours. And the more you look at this picture, the more you know, you will pick out more and more colours. You start seeing personal belongings such as a toy car or wedding pictures, or you find somebody’s hat or somebody’s bag and you start seeing little pieces of somebody’s life. And you suddenly start seeing people’s lives come out of the rubble. And that is the colours for me. And also because the main impression I got from people there at the end of the day was hope, and that is also where the colour comes in.”
Syed Hamad Ali is an independent writer based in London.
